By Keith Idec

Even after it was officially announced, Regis Prograis didn’t believe Viktor Postol would actually fight him Friday night.

Prograis figured he represented too much risk and too little reward for Postol. That’s why the New Orleans native wasn’t the least bit surprised when Postol pulled out of their fight for the WBC’s interim super lightweight title three weeks ago.

Ukraine’s Postol (29-1, 12 KOs) cited a fractured thumb as the reason he withdrew from facing Prograis (20-0, 17 KOs).

“I really didn’t believe Postol was gonna take the fight in the first place,” Prograis told BoxingScene.com. “Me and my coach was worrying about a month ago and I said, ‘Look, I don’t think Postol’s gonna take that fight. It just doesn’t make sense for him to take that fight with somebody like me.’

“So I was definitely training for Postol, but I didn’t think he was gonna take the fight. And he didn’t. … I feel like he will fight me eventually. But as far as right now, I just felt like he had too much to lose and he wasn’t gonna fight me. That was what I thought and it came true.”

The powerful southpaw instead will meet Namibia’s Julius Indongo (22-1, 11 KOs) on Friday night at Deadwood Mountain Grand, a casino and resort in Deadwood, South Dakota. Showtime will televise Prograis-Indongo as the main event of a special edition of “ShoBox: The New Generation.”

Like Prograis, Indongo is a southpaw. Postol, who’s right-handed, had difficulty with a left-handed opponent in his last fight.

Uzbekistan’s Jamshidbek Najmiddinov (17-1, 11 KOs) dropped Postol in the fifth round of that bout, but Postol won a 10-round unanimous decision September 16 in Kiev. That was the only fight for the 34-year-old Postol since Terence Crawford (32-0, 23 KOs) out-boxed him and won a unanimous decision in their 12-round, 140-pound title unification fight in July 2016 in Las Vegas.

“His last fight, he fought a southpaw, some dude, I think he was 14-0, in [Postol’s] hometown,” Prograis said. “And he got dropped like three times. I think they counted one time, but he got dropped three times. That was against another southpaw, but he wasn’t nothing like I am.

“So I think with me, I feel like I would’ve hurt him, I would’ve finished him. And I think him and his team, they knew that, so they wouldn’t take the fight. It’s too much risk and little reward for him right now.”

The WBC will require the winner between Prograis, who’s ranked No. 2 among its 140-pound contenders, and the ninth-ranked Indongo to face whoever emerges from a March 17 fight that’ll pit Amir Imam (21-1, 18 KOs) against Jose Ramirez (21-0, 16 KOs). The top-ranked Imam, of Albany, New York, and the third-rated Ramirez, of Avenal, California, will fight for the unclaimed WBC 140-pound championship Crawford vacated to move up to welterweight last year in The Theater at Madison Square Garden (ESPN).

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.